Thursday, 3 November 2011

on behalf of the Zeitgeist team I'd like to announce that today we're releasing the latest version of Zeitgeist (0.8.99-alpha1). It's quite unusual for Zeitgeist to do alpha releases, but this one is special - the entire daemon was rewritten from Python to Vala, which most likely brings a couple of new bugs, but also fixes another bunch of old bugs. Therefore we'd need people to test the release to see if there are some outstanding issues we missed.

The biggest difference you'll be able to see at this point is much faster startup time, other than that the changes will be minimal - we're still using the same database, as well as the same DBus API, so everything should be working as before. One thing we did break is the API for the Activity Journal extension, so if you want to continue using it with this and further releases, you need to update also Activity Journal.

What's still missing is rewrite of our FTS extension (which provides search capabilities), so for the time being we're still using the old one written in python which is included in the tarball.

Before I wrap up, I'd like to say huge thank you to Collabora and Canonical, who sponsored the development, and of course to the whole team: Seif (seiflotfy), Siegfried (RainCT), Mikkel (kamstrup) and Manish (m4n1sh).